Concert review : ROGER WATERS - In The Flesh (7/4/03, Bangalore)

This is an exerpt from the diary I'd written after attending the concert in Bangalore.


I know its too late for this, but then I didnt know about IGT way back then.

hopefully, some of you will like it, especially Floyd fans.

It's in two parts.

 

Part 1

All 4 tickets were with RR. Our auto deposited us near the Palace Grounds, Fun World entrance. I was still drowsy and top heavy after sinking those mugfulls, and even the Disprin didn't seem to have helped much. Alighting from the auto, I almost flopped (er..sat down) on the footpath and so, RR sat beside me and let me know that she had puked on someone's "fcuking face" only a few days back and that such crap happens from time to time. As if !! We bought a couple of packets of chips, then went through the gates and stood in the queue. The place was teeming.


I sat under a "lemon tree" a little away from the serpentine and growing queue, and then lay down, pulling my jacket over my face. Beneath a nearby tree, some 4 or 5 guys had managed to patao a couple of foreign chicks and were guzzling and singing (along with) the Floyd songs being belted out of the mega speakers, (we had come and checked out the venue and the arrangements the previous night) totally out of scale and tune, in hoarse voices. My detachment from all the action helped somewhat, and soon I wasn't feeling all that lousy. I had already tied one of those yellow ribbons that everyone was given one of, to my jeans. Then I got up and joined the others in the line. All the illegal stuff were hidden away, shared between the 4 of us.


I had been assigned the formidable job of smuggling the set of 4 Dictaphoe cassettes in, and had accordingly hidden it neatly in the small of my back, just below my belt. BB and RR asked me where I'd kept them, and upon my pointing out, noted with deep satisfaction (ie "with a grin") the high chances of them going in undetected. BB hismelf had a homo-esque experience with one of the friskers, but managed in the end, to get the Dictaphone across. No such luck wth RR though, as the cigarette packet was confiscated from her ubiquitous handbag. A cassette would have suffered a similar fate but she let the watchman know that it was her "fcuking Firehouse"!! PP meanwhile had managed to smuggle in an important thing - DOPE. The guards threw away the ticket covers and we were given the cridit card like tickets for keeps. And in we went!!


Disappointment greeted us. Our "high hopes" were all dashed. We were so far away from the action - 900 bucks tickets afterall. All that we could see on the screen was a giant pink pig!! Me and PP managed to stand right behind the metal fence that seperated the 1500 from the 900, but BB and RR couldn't make it to the front row, for rather different reasons . The crowd around and behind us were getting to be a pain. The show commenced and they started showing Syd Barret, factory chimneys from some blue collar city in England and some of the album covers/sleeves, including a revolving prism from the cover of DSOTM, in the giant screen.


A little later came the "marching flowers" and "fcuking flowers" (that Waters had spoken of, during Channel V weekends) as he sang songs from their Wall album. After thirty minutes of getting shoved around and catching the odd rare glimpse of Roger, out of the corner of our eyes, and over peoples heads, we decided to head back in disgust, and made our way towards the supplementary speakers. Though I do not remember the sequence of the songs, he had by now done some of the early Floyd stuff, like "pigs on the wing", "welcome to the machine" and the many parts of "shine on". BB had closed his eyes in dismay and was just trying to get a good listen and a noise free bootleg. I had handed the tapes over to him and it had taken a lot of engineering tips from PP to get the archiac dictaphone operational. They also played "Goodbye Blue Sky" and "Mother", with the lady backing vocalist doing most of the singing for the latter.


We sat down on the grass, me and RR and lit a ciggy each. We could hear the songs alright and could also see the truely fantastic displays on the screen, (as in wont in any floyd concert), but could hardly ever see the guy himself. Then BB and RR went to the grub stalls to get (soft) drinks for us all, while I still sat on the grass and proceeded to execute the express instructions that I had been given to, by her - that of keeping a close eye on the her high heels (that she had taken off). A pain man, this woman kind !! All around people were sitting, smoking, talking, drinking and doping openly. Dont know how they managed to smuggle in all those bottles and packets. There was a thick cloud of smoke above our heads and growing steadly bigger. The sky was thus quite "obscured by clouds" - of ciggy and dope smoke!!


All around there was a sense of visible and audible disappointment - we weren't the only ones to be pissed off with the view - or the lack of it. We sipped Pepsi and argeed that this was most likely going to be a total waste of Money and Time, of which the latter, Waters had just finished performing. A tank topped girl had swooned, maybe in an overdose of grass, boose and ofcourse excitement, and we saw her getting carried away, saddled on the shoulders of some guy. Nearby another guy was wearing a tee shirt which conveyed quite clearly that Obituary was a rather good "reason to die"!! Yet another guy with a decidedly zonked out look, barked into his mobile phone "Fags! Fags! I want fags!!". We never came to know whether he got the sort of "fags" he wanted, and didnt want to either. Then Waters took a 10 minute break and the flood lights switched on.

 

Part 2

We headed for the grub stalls again, this time to grab a bite. While grubbing, the knob from the dictaphone fell down and we asked people to please stand back so that we could look for it on the now lit up ground. Something fell out of BB's jeans during the search, something wrapped in a newspaper. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, little realizing that it would later be instrumental in taking me to my high (pun intended) point of this concert. PP then found the knob to be inside the dictaphone itself !! The show was to resume soon and so back we headed. Waters played Another Brick in the Wall (part II) to thunderous applause and then Money. For all his many animated gestures during those two songs (guitar playing, skin slamming), it might as well have been BB performing those songs!! People watched the madman freak out.


We went up ahead towards the main speakers, for the crowd hadn't yet gathered too densely yet. And then came the IDEA. We decided to climb up the elaborate metal framework that supported the speakers, which some guys had already done. Earlier we had even debated climbing trees as some monkeys had done. But then, we arn't monkeys we reasoned, and dropped that idea. But this seemed quite on the "human" side, this climbing of the framework, and so we promptly did. I went deep inside it (the framework) and high too (later in another way). This move of ours changed the whole thing for us, and none of us left the venue with a bitter taste, when the show was over. My jacket came in handy, for I used it to cushion that one half of my ass which supported me on a metal V, while the other half hung free!!


Supporting services were also needed from another hand and leg.(so nelson. hand= leg= ass= 1) It isnt the greatest feeling in the world to have steel rods all round your anatomy including your you know what, but then this was Waters and we had to do our bit. PP, or at least most of him, climbed up too and so did RR. She later told me that the rod she sat on, was horizontal, which wasn't the case with mine, unfortunately. The view from up there was clear and awesome, though from a distance, and we could all see the performers quite clearly, Snowy, Doyle, Roger Waters and the backing vocalists, who were very good.


There was a guy on the other half of the steel "V", I was on. His name, he told me, was Mickey. S/W engineer in Delhi. I asked him if he had any cigarettes. Yes. Match Box? Yes. I told him that I had some dope with me (the news paper wrapped packet). Call it serendipity if you will, but I now had all the stuff I'd need, with myself accounting for not one of them. Promising to share the dope with Mickey, I borrowed a cigarette from him and tried to roll a joint. I hadn't a clue how to go about it, so now I confessed that to him and asked him to make one, for the two of us. Waters would be a real special occasion to try grass, and I wasn't going to let the chance get away easily.


He gave me hope. He made the dope. He mashed the seeds. He poured the tobacco. He mixed the stuff. He made the change. He rearranged. He even rolled. He put it all back in. And he lit the joint. Then all that he mashed, all that he poured, all that he changed, all that he destroyed, and all he created and everything he rolled and everystuff he mixed and everything under the speakers - went up in smoke ..... as I made my dope debut. Erriely enough, just a few drags later, Waters sang Brain Damage!! The "lunatic" was by now, very much "on the grass". More joints were made (by mickey) and shared with other fellow lunatics, all perched inside the metal framework.


Floyd and grass made for a truely potent cocktail, and the camaradrie developed with complete strangers, united by our common desire to climb slightly higher (to get a better view) as also move slightly higher (to win the "who looks more spaced out?" contest), made empathising with bong-sharing hippies and other floyd-hardened psychadelic folk of the sixtes, rather easy. Even RR pitched in, in the "joint effort", uber-kitsch as she was, and so did BB (btw, BB is my cousin. PP and RR are his friends, not mine). One guy asked me for some "reed". Doped as I was, could not "reed" him at first. Maybe THAT lunatic was already very much "on the grass" (from some other source), or it was just me tuning in from wonderland. There's no telling in a Floyd concert!!


Meanwhile Mickey asked me where in Bangalore we found girls. Huh!?! "Everywhere" I said. "No, no, hookers" he clarified. I confessesd, through the fog of dope-laced smoke and from the murky depths of my now foggy mind, having not even the foggiest idea about this one. That didn't seem to upset him all that much and our colaboration, er "joint" venture, continued - with me supplying the grass and him the cigs. BB was still busy bootlegging and PP, having now got a clear view of Waters "In The Flesh", had gone comfortably numb (he was the blind floyd fan amongst us). Meanwhile I was having a cloud 9-esque experience. Waters introduced his fellow performers to the audience.


The show had run for almost three hours now and most of the famous Floyd songs, except any from Division Bell, were covered. He did quite a bit of his solo stuff too. Then he sang the crowd favourite of "Comfortably Numb" to end the show. One guy in our "frame-net-work", relayed the song to some distant friend of his, through his mobile phone!! The crowd cheered whilst the artists left the stage - only to come back immediately, to sing a beautiful number called "Flickering Flame". The song was as melodious as it was haunting. I liked it very much, not the least the backing vocalists' singing their bit at full pitch. Flames of that anthem, still flicker in all our hearts. That song is still the one, that transports me back best, to the "In The Flesh" concert, we attended in Bangalore, in 2002.


The show ended. The metal framework of the speakers had saved the day for us. Slowly people started leaving. I dunno about others, but I was still in a daze. Suddenly there was an emptyness and the realization that the very reason why these 3 characters (BB, RR and PP) had turned up in idly-land, had just ended for good, sunk in with a thud. BB and RR were talking god alone knows what, musical ramifications perhaps. PP was dead silent. Music was in their hearts, heads & veins. I just suck into what little I can. I kicked an empty bottle of rum lying on the ground. Then out we all headed. Later in our room, we unanimously agreed that we'd actually gotten Rs 1200 (out of 900, 1.5K and 2.5K) tickets, thanks to those steel rods and had managed to salvage quite a bit of the fun after the initial disappointment.


And thus went our experience, at the Roger Waters, "In The Flesh" concert.

 

i attached a poll.. lol please vote.

its an open poll - but i promise not to mind a negetive vote !!

 

mine is a combination of da 1st & da last option.. which 1 shall i go for ?? :grin:

 

if you havent read it how do you know its good lol

 

Some famous person once said:
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter"
Brevity is an art, a talent that many unfortunately do not possess.

 

k.
noted.

 

@ananth..
err.. was tht praise or criticsm ?

 

Nostalgic.

I met a friend during the concert and he asked me if I had any ciggs on me, and I said, "No, we don't have ciggs, but we do have joints !!!". :

:rockon:

 

whoa!! at last a comment... i had almost given up on it lol

ty. nice to know you enjoyed reading it. thing is i have forgotten the "set" he played, so i couldn't write much about the songs themselves, sadly.


roger waters was my first major concert and also the first time i doped.


so when i think dope i am reminded of waters and vise versa lol

 

yeh dil kya kya mangey ??

oh yeah i have to add this one !!


i didnt include it in my dairy 'coz i didnt see it myself. but anyway here's an anecdote about the waters concert.



my friend (who went separately, with his own group of buddies) and i met up a couple of days after the concert and were discussing about it. he told me he had seen a guy at the concert wearing a T-shirt with the line "yeah dil mangey GIL-more!!" written, to voice his dismay at Gilmore's absence.

and then he says to me " the deep purple concert is comming up in Goa soon. i plan to go there". and guess what T-shirt he told me, he had in mind for the DP concert - "yeah dil mangey BLACK-more!!!"

:rock: :rockon: :beer:

 

try falling in love with a girl, head over heels in love with her.....and try brevity....if u can manage to be tacit..and then tell me if u can tell her what u feel about her in just 3 words :

great one....man...like butthead says...we're there dude....(in this case i was)

 

^^i agree with the thing abt girls..but who gives a damn?
and from where did they come in here?

 

Hey Jamhead, that stuff about Gilmour and Blackmore was funny.

BTW I met a jackass during the same concert and he was cussing Roger Waters like hell, talking all crap.

Maybe you and me met the same guy :think:

 

Jamhead..i voted for the lack of details part..its understandable that u dont remember it too clearly.

 

erowid.org ?


but the doping episode was only by way of consequence. the main object was to write about the roger waters concert

 

haha..i understand.

 

takes one to understand one eh?


and what have u to say about that mickey being perched on the same steel rod just when i needed him and with just the supplies that i myself lacked ?


god i hope i haven't imagined that mickey up

 

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